The week before I started the best-job-ever, I snuck into a new job related event. It’s fun being unofficially official!
In 1985, this was built to serve Legacy business park:
But the tower sat unused for the last five years and needed to be removed to faciltate the development of Legacy West, a new 250-acre mixed-use project.
The tower was 178 feet high and weighed 550 tons. How exactly do you get something like that down in a safe and cost-efficient manner?
Answer: Tipping.
The tower base was cut like you would cut a tree trunk for felling. The contractor’s crew started work early and at 9 a.m. on the dot, down came the tower!
The griping you hear in the video is me, upset that I wasn’t ready at 9 a.m. on the dot for the tower to fall. Thankfully, Kelly is always prepared and captured it all on video.
Once the tower was down, the contractor’s team cut up the tower and took the pieces away for scrap. In fact, contractors usually bid to remove these structures because the value of the scrap metal is far higher than the cost to take down the structure. Economical indeed!
And that, my friends, is how you remove a water tower! Pretty cool, huh?
